Bethany Collins — April 9, 1963

Bethany Collins (American, born 1984) April 9, 1963

2016 Blind embossed paper 26 ¼ x 18 in Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art, Northwestern University, purchase funds provided by Julie and Lawrence Bernstein Family Art Acquisition Fund, Press Collection Endowment Fund, and Block Museum Special Projects Fund, 2020.3.1

This blind embossed print reproduces the front page of an issue of The Birmingham News from 1963. Part of a series of prints, it refers to one day in the Birmingham campaign, the 38-day series of non-violent actions against segregation. The protest, which lasted from April 3 until May 10 that year, included lunch counter sit-ins, marches on City Hall, and boycotts of downtown merchants. Although these historic events were covered in the national press, the board of The Birmingham News chose not to write about the Civil Rights protests. Bethany Collins’s work draws attention to how the press decided to omit important events in the Civil Rights Movement from its pages. The print’s raised surface creates a ghostly, barely legible text that calls into question the objectivity of news reporting. By printing the newspaper without ink, the artist highlights the intentional absence of the historic events from the local newspaper that spring, an editorial decision that was meant to negate the protester’s claims of injustice and deny the systemic racism they experienced.